About Nietzsche’s “philosophers of the future”, Laurence Lampert rightly says:
[size=91]“The philosophers of the future rule in the only way philosophers have ever ruled, through a new highest ideal.” (Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, page 78.)[/size]
He’s wrong, however, in identifying that ideal as the eternal recurrence itself, and not as the one who wills that recurrence. This misidentification is made explicit in a later work of his:
[size=91]“Before presenting the new ideal, Nietzsche describes the person capable of thinking it as an ideal: ‘the most high-spirited, most alive, most world-affirming human being.’” (Lampert, Nietzsche’s Task, page 118, quoting Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 56.)[/size]
What Nietzsche writes is: “the ideal of the most high-spirited” etc. Now Lampert understands this “of” in a strictly possessive sense. However, it can also be interpreted in the sense of, for instance, the phrase “the ideal of selflessness”.¹ To be sure, Lampert is right again when he says:
[size=91]“The highest ideal for a world-affirming human being is that the world as it is eternally return just as it is.” (ibid.)[/size]
What’s crucial, however, is that this ideal can never be a direct “means of effecting the rule of the philosopher of the future” (Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, page 104). For, for non-philosophers, the eternal return of the world as it is is not an ideal, i.e., not something to desire.—I think Strauss, perhaps by virtue of his being a native German-speaker, did understand the aforementioned “of” in a not (exclusively) possessive sense. Because Lampert does not, he is forced to read Strauss relatively badly at one point:
[size=91]“In the final two sentences of his paragraph on the complementary man’s solution to the most difficult problem, Strauss names two different actions with two different actors, an act by one who paves the way for the complementary man, and an act by that ‘highest nature’ itself.” (op.cit., page 108.)[/size]
In fact, Strauss does nothing of the sort. There is nothing in Strauss’s formulation to suggest that there are two actions; and the repetition of the phrase “unbounded Yes”, which first occurred at the end of the preceding paragraph, and which Lampert interpreted correctly at the bottom of page 101, implies that there is only one action:
[size=91]“While paving the way for the complementary man, one must at the same time say unbounded Yes to the fragments and cripples. Nature, the eternity of nature, owes its being to a postulation, to an act of the will to power on the part of the highest nature.” (Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, page 190.)[/size]
There is no difference between saying unbounded Yes to the fragments and cripples and postulating the eternal return of nature; there is no difference between the one who paves the way for the complementary man and that highest nature itself.² Nietzsche paved the way for philosophers of the future by being himself a philosopher of the future, by willing the eternal recurrence; the new highest ideal through which the philosophers of the future rule is the ideal of the philosopher of the future, in the non-possessive sense of the word “of”… One manifests this ideal, however, by openly and sincerely proclaiming the ideal of the eternal recurrence,³ by ardently wishing out loud “that the world as it is eternally return just as it is.”
By willing the eternal recurrence, i.e., by having the eternal recurrence as one’s highest ideal, one manifests oneself as a philosopher of the future, a Superman, a complementary man, or however you wish to call it. And for those who do not love reality enough to desire its eternal recurrence, that manifestation can be what the eternal recurrence itself cannot, their highest ideal. “I’m not sufficiently well-disposed toward reality to wish for its eternal recurrence; but I wish I was! I wish reality or I myself would be so changed that I should wish with all my heart for the eternal recurrence”… What the Superman does is, he shows that it’s possible to be that well-disposed toward reality as it is.
What has attracted Lampert, a self-proclaimed non-philosopher, to philosophy? Was it that which the philosopher desires, wisdom? Or was it the philosopher himself, men like Nietzsche, Plato, Bacon, and Descartes? Aren’t they the great erotics who arouse in non-philosophers the eros that makes them devote themselves to philosophy? Makes Lampert, for example, withdraw from society for protracted periods of time to write book upon book showcasing the brilliance of such men? Something he will probably keep doing, if possible, until the day he dies? These questions are of course rhetorical, and I think Lampert’s kind of activity is the highest kind for a non-philosopher. He cannot and need not glorify reality itself; that must be left to actual philosophers. What suffices is to glorify them, as those who glorify reality. For by doing so, one illuminates the way that they paved for their kind.
Notes:
¹ The ascetic ideal, too, is in the first place a person. Thus in the express sequel to Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche speaks of “[man’s] will to erect an ideal—that of the ‘holy god’” (On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Treatise, section 22. In Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books”, '‘Genealogy of Morals’, he calls his ideal the “counter-ideal” to the ascetic). The ideal of the “holy god” is surely the perfect symmetrical counterpart of the ideal of the most high-spirited, alive, and world-affirming human being: “sanctus deus” contra “vitiosus deus”!
² Remarkable as it may be that the one who paves the way be the same as the one(s) whom that paving prepares, this is not a novelty introduced first in Nietzsche’s mature philosophy. Thus in Nietzsche’s early, posthumously published essay “The Greek State”, the military genius is the instrument by which nature arrives at the state, i.e., at a classical organisation of society (its organisation into classes), which is the precondition of the development of Apollonian genius; and in the prototypical state, the military state, the genius that is developed is the military genius itself. (By “the development of genius”, I mean the genius’s sprouting and flourishing culturally, not naturally. This means that the initial military genius must sprout and flourish naturally. And the same goes for the initial Superman: Nietzsche had to sprout and flourish naturally, and because he did, Supermen can now sprout and flourish culturally. In Strauss’s words: “It is however the history of man hitherto, i.e. the rule of non-sense and chance, which is the necessary condition for the subjugation of non-sense and chance.” (Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, page 189.) Nietzsche came to sprout and flourish non-sensically, by chance, and because he did, men like him can now do so sensically, by design. And doesn’t what Nietzsche wrote about the military genius also apply to the Superman? “The weaker forces attach themselves to them with such mysterious speed, and transform themselves so wonderfully, in the sudden swelling of that violent avalanche, under the charm of that creative kernel, into an affinity hitherto not existing, that it seems as if a magic will were emanating from them.” (“The Greek State”.) What I’m suggesting is that the Superman “wills” the cultural sprouting and flourishing of Supermen first and foremost by manifesting himself as a Superman, by willing the eternal recurrence. In fact, I think that suffices—that the rest “is just the idleness of God on every seventh day…” (Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books”, ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, end.)
³ By openly and exuberantly proclaiming one’s will to the eternal return of suffering and inequality—“the prerequisites of human greatness” (ibid.)—, one wills present and future suffering and inequality, and thereby commands and legislates future such greatness. In other words: through unconcealed actual-philosophic greatness, one commands and legislates future such greatness. Thus Harry Neumann rephrases roughly the second half of Strauss’s paragraph on the complementary man’s solution to the most difficult problem as follows: “Although the past was responsible for the present egalitarianism detested by Nietzsche, for the most part it was characterized by the inequalities dear to him. However, lack of awareness of nihilism’s threat formerly led men to take those inequalities for granted, to interpret them as necessary consequences of natural or divine justice. Modern thinkers culminating in Nietzsche made men aware that human creativity or technology was not limited by anything. Nietzsche feared that contemporary egalitarians would employ this unlimited power to create a world of universal peace and equality. He yearned for a superman whose will to overpower nihilism and egalitarianism would use modernity’s immense power to create the eternal return of the past’s inequality and wars. Then there would be no wars to end all wars.” (Neumann, Liberalism, pp. 165-66.) The reason there would be no wars to end all wars is that at the very least the wars of the past would eternally recur. This also goes for the Superman: the Superman whose conditions Nietzsche creates is in the first place Nietzsche himself—the Nietzsche of the “next” cycle. And in the broad sense, it is in the first place all the Supermen of the past… But this is an absurdly literal interpretation of what Strauss describes. It’s well-nigh inconceivable that, if time is not yet a circle, we could so to say bend it into a circle; let alone that we could ever know that we’d succeeded. It’s highly improbable that we could ever cause a new Big Bang; but a new Great Flood is already much more probable…
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